Woodsmen

     Saturdays in the spring and fall during my childhood were frequently spent in the woods, helping my parents and brother cut firewood. Dad had permission from the landowner to cut fallen hardwoods from the thicket of vines and briars that are the hallmark of Delmarva pine forests. This wasn't always the case. Ecological history tells us that the forests along the Atlantic coast once boasted old-growth trees so large that they shaded out most undergrowth. A man could ride through the woods at a full gallop.
    In the corner of these woods was a vaguely beaten trail that ran from the farm road behind the line of houses in the town of Church Creek, to Brannock's Neck Road about a quarter of a mile away, which then ran down to the water. Legend says that in colonial days, some gentleman met his demise there while on a late night ride. Dorchester County folklore keeper Tom Flowers--the "Old Honker"--first introduced me to the story of the "Ghost of Tick's Path." I can no longer remember the details of the story, but with a thrilling sense of dread and delight, I used to imagine I could hear the hooves of Tick's horse as I pushed the wheelbarrow full of logs along the path in the woods.
   The scents and sounds of those days in the woods still captivate me, from the sputtering buzz of the chainsaw and the oily smoke coming from its motor, to the musty, earthy smell of the leaves and the tentative twittering of the startled birds. When Dad cut off the chainsaw, the quiet dropped like a blanket except for the sound of the wind rocking the tops of the tall pines and the crunching of the leaves beneath our feet. I did my share of the work, but I am eight years younger than my brother and had the luxury of sensing it all.
   We continue to burn wood as our primary heat, and so spend our fair share of Saturdays cutting wood. Sadly, we usually do not cut in the woods. A neighbor or family member often has a tree that has fallen, and we are more than happy to clean it up and take the wood. We have spent the last 15 years slowing taking down the gum and "trash" trees in the hedgerow along our property, making way for pin oaks. It remains a family affair.
   My brother, who doesn't have a woodstove, often 'invites' us down to cut wood and performs more than a fair share of the labor. A good deal for us, but what's in it for him? I suspect he too has fond memories of weekends in the woods, and a love of being outdoors working. So it was that I found myself down in Dorchester County this weekend, trying to cut up the remnants of a 170 year old cherry tree on the waterfront property belonging to my brother Jim's friend. The base of the tree was probably six-feet in diameter, but hollow in the center. It had come down last year, fortunately missing the house. A giant hornet's nest was inside, but winter took care of that.
   We had cut and split the two-foot pieces of log last month, but Jim and my husband seemed determined to tackle the trunk, cutting through half of the massive base and then splitting it off with wedges. It seemed like a difficult way to get firewood, but I suspect it presented a bit of a manly challenge. As always, everyone had a job. I do not use the chainsaw--sharp moving tools and I have a bad history--but I haul and stack and do whatever else is needed. I do like to split nice dry wood, but this cherry was so old and tough, it almost seemed petrified. It was futile to try to split it without a wedge, although my 72-year old mother insisted on trying and so I felt compelled to attempt a few also.

   It was a strange day. A sudden burst of rain forced us to quit an hour after arriving. We loaded up some unsplit logs and retreated back to my parents' house. An hour later, it cleared and we returned to try chiseling off some more of the giant log. The sky grew dark over the river again and I looked over at my son, my husband, my brother and my father: my son fearlessly handling a maul; my husband on top of the trunk, silhouetted against the swirling gray clouds; my brother wielding a chainsaw; my father standing alongside the tree. The four most important men in my life. Woodsmen. It was an unexpected moment and I realized that what moved me was not nature. Cutting firewood may seem like an odd family tradition, but it is ours.

Dead Wood

   I was a writer before I was a historian. For as long as I can remember my head has been filled with stories. At first, the stories were about others, about Laura Ingalls and Mary Lennox and Jo March. Growing up in a county where my mother's family had settled in the 1650s, in a town where the church had my ancestors names embossed in the stained glass, in a house built by my great-grandfather where the floor boards bore worm holes from being carried aboard his schooner, I was also surrounded by stories--and by history.

   My grandmother, Cleora, loved to tell stories that were more like snippets, enticing little facts about which she often neglected to provide details:
      "I broke your Pop Pop's ribs when we were horsing around."
     "My brothers once tied two cow's tails together."
     "A crab pinched my finger many years ago, that's why it doesn't bend."

   In 1985, when I was 15, the stories stopped. My grandmother was 85, and died of a massive heart attack. It came as a complete shock to me. As a small child, my substantial imagination led me to occasionally worry that something bad would happen to my parents, but I never, ever thought anything would happen to Mom Mom. I wrote my first "family story" the next year, a class assignment. It was called "Present Past." My  English teacher, John Wood, loved the title: "Get it," he said to the class, "the past is always present to the main character in the story."


   The past has always been present to me. About the same time I started writing in earnest, I became an avid genealogist and by extension, a student of local history. Names and dates were never enough  for me, however, and I was thirsty to know who these people were, these names on my family tree. Occupations, real estate, names of children, military service, much of this I could discover, but I longed for stories the documents did not reveal.

   So, I made them up. I took the anecdotes, the snippets, did some research (often not nearly enough), and imagined the lives of my family members. I did what every writer of historical fiction does (including James Michener, who I am certain based at least one of his Chesapeake characters on my Dorchester County ancestors) and populated my fiction with the people, places and events of real history. My senior English thesis in high school was a novel based on the Eastern Shore in the late 1700s; my history thesis was a history of Dorchester County during the American Revolution.

   Writing history, I learned, was easy. To write historical fiction well, was not. When I went to Washington College in Chestertown--the Eastern Shore writers' mecca--my split personality continued. My history teachers embraced my love of writing (as long as my facts were footnoted), but my creative writing teacher seemed to loathe my family stories.

   "You've got to get rid of the dead wood," he insisted. "Write about what you know."

   For my senior English project I wrote a novel (oh, and a history thesis analyzing the demise of the Federalist Party in Maryland). For a summer and a school year I retreated to my third floor fellowship room in the Victorian-style O'Neill Literary House and wrote about a young girl growing up on Maryland's Eastern Shore, struggling to exorcise the hold that small town traditions and secrets held over her, to escape her family history.

   Dead wood.

   I guess I didn't understand what he was saying. But that WAS what I knew, what I understood, what compelled me. I am still proud of my novel, the last fiction I ever wrote.

   As I see it now, it was half a novel. The novel of a 21 year old. Almost twenty years later, I can envision the second half of the novel, though it may never be written. The main character embraces the place that formed her, accepts the history that has created her, and finds a way to tell her own story. A story where the past is present.

   I remember the day that the resolution of the novel came to me. On a warm early summer day I was sitting in the shade with my nearly one year old son. It was a day just like one I describe at the beginning of my novel, a scene inspired by the idyllic description of Knoxville, Tennessee in James Agee's "A Death in the Family." It was also the day that I decided to put my full-time history career on hold in order to live my own family story.

I'm thinking of a day when I was five and I was swinging high in the tire swing that hung in the maple tree in my backyard as Daddy mowed the grass and Mother planted marigolds in the flower garden behind the house. I remember tilting my head back to see the deep, robin's egg expanse of the sky  through an olive-colored veil of leaves, then looking out beyond our yard at the sea of full-grown corn which spread to the line of pine trees in the distance. I breathed in the scents of cut grass, the dandelions I held in my lap, and the damp, raw smell of earth freshly uncovered in our neighbors' gardens. The hum of the lawnmower reverberated loudly in my ears while a chorus of sparrow chattered to each other above my head, the cicadas occasionally chiming in with their shrill, dried gourd rattle. Almost all afternoon I observed my world from that pleasant, breezy seat.

Meet My New Mini Tillers

I am a to-do list kind of person. I like checking things off, and have been known to write something down only to immediately check it off, just to feel a sense of accomplishment. Nothing makes me feel better than knowing something on my to-do list is getting done when I'm not even around. I'm not talking about a 'honey-do' list either. I'm talking about getting three loads of laundry hung on the line before you have to leave for the day, knowing they will be dry by the time you get home. I'm talking about perfectly timing the baking of bread, braising of a roast and boiling of potatoes so that everything is ready simultaneously.


Chicken-keeping has not been this kind of job. After a week or two of freedom in my back yard, the chickens began roaming over to the neighbors yard to scratch in her flower beds, looking for hidden bugs. This is not too much of a problem in February, but once the spring bulbs began to emerge I knew my neighbor would be out clearing her beds and wouldn't appreciate stepping in chicken poop. So I invested in 200 more feet of fence and decided to enclose a fair portion of the "back forty" as pasture. The added benefit was that it would reduce how much grass we have to mow all summer long. Within a week, the chickens had turned that 250 square feet of emerging weeds into a mud pit.

So back they went into the small chicken yard and I didn't let them out for nearly week. In protest, they flew up at the fence and rushed the door whenever I walked by as if trying to escape. They also began pecking and eating their own eggs. Chicken cannibalism. Nice. I get the picture. Let us out or the little one gets it.

Back I went to good old Tractor Supply, this time in search of some "step-in" fence posts and heavy-duty plastic fence. I had experimented with putting up some temporary pasture last summer, and knew I needed more fence and an easier way of moving the fence to new areas of grass. But since there was still no grass growing in the yard, I stretched the fence from the coop, around my vegetable garden and back again. The garden was mostly bare, but there were some weeds, broccoli stalks from last year, and plenty of leaves that had blown in.

Pretty soon, I started to appreciate how powerfully those chickens can scratch. Within a day, they were down to bare ground in spots, searching out seeds and sprouts and hopefully some grubs. In softer areas, they dug 5 or 6 inch holes and nested there in the afternoons.

I caught one hen throwing up so much loose dirt that it rained over her and she shook it off with delight, almost like a dog. Chickens use dust baths to keep off pests, but this looked like pure fun to me.

After two weeks they have begun to break down the tough oak leaves--I sprinkled some cracked corn in the thickest areas to encourage them to scratch around. The places I plan to plant potatoes, peas, lettuce and spinach in the next few weeks are outside the fence, and it won't be time to plant anything else until almost May. By then, I'm hoping there will be plenty of grass growing.




So meet my new mini tillers. They work all by themselves while I'm doing something else.

New Year's Resolutions

Yes, I know it's March. Yes, New Year's day came and went two and a half months ago. But yesterday was the first day of spring, and to me that is when the new year truly begins. It's about the time when--if you're going to have a garden all--you better have at least thought about it.

I am a pathological planner. I have a garden calendar I developed that tells me exactly when I need to start my peppers inside, when it is best to plant the first lettuce in the cold frame and when the first tomatoes can be safely transplanted. I print it out each year and check off when I complete each task. I can tell you that I was three weeks late starting my pepper seeds and equally as late in planting lettuce outside.

I am a pathetic perfectionist. I could not find the right organic seed starting mix when it came time to seed the peppers.

I had not found the time to build a small raised bed in the hoop house, so I held off seeding the lettuce. And I was so busy with other spring cleanup tasks this weekend, that I did not have time to apply a load of mushroom soil to the potato row and so I certainly couldn't get them in the ground until that was done.

I am a person who procrastinates. A gardener has nothing but time in the winter. Time to peruse the seed catalogs and dream. Time to make lists of what to grow. Time to place where each crop will grow in the garden. All of this could be done in January in front of a warm fire, cup of cocoa in hand. Yet, there I was last week, sketching out where to plant everything--you have to have proper crop rotation, of course--knowing that the seeds would arrive the next day. The poor tomato seeds still sit on my kitchen counter waiting to be planted and the seed starting soil has dried out in the pots. Today, I will do it. Really.

My compulsion to plan and my desire for perfection has most definitely led me to procrastinate when it comes to my blog. Even now, as I struggle to find the right "p"s to complete my alliterations, my brain is screaming "just write something!" I want each blog to have a theme, to instruct, to be properly illustrated--a feature article ready for submission. No wonder I postpone!

So my resolution for the New Gardening Year is to let go of some measure of perfectionism and try to write something at least once a week. Sometimes you've just got to get it in the ground.

When Life Gives You Eggs, Make Flan!

I am a huge fan of creamy milk and egg concoctions with a sugar syrup/crust, no matter what the variety: Flan, creme brûlée, custard, creme caramel; French, English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Mexican, "southern" American. Since my hens are laying well and the Christmas baking is done, I have plenty of eggs I need to "use up." Although I am a pretty good cook, I must admit that making a decent caramel consistently has so far been beyond me. I've researched all the tricks, to no avail.

Anyway, as much as I like a nice caramel syrup, it's a bit of work to make the caramel, mix the flan, bake chill and unmold. A simple dessert shouldn't be that much work. Crème brûlée skips the caramel-making and unmolding steps and replaces it with sprinkling raw sugar over the top and melting and browning with a butane torch. The problem is I don't have a butane torch, so the last time I made it I used my 30" flame weeder. I felt a bit powerful using it indoors--over a very large sheet pan mind you--but worried about setting my kitchen cabinets on fire.

Still, there's no substitute for that pleasant crack as you peck with your spoon against the top of the crème brûlée, however I have an additional complaint: most crème brûlée recipes call for whole eggs, plus additional egg YOLKS. What does one do with those extra white? Yes, I know, angel food cake, but that takes almost a dozen and not 3 or 4. Don't even joke to me about throwing the whites away. And I NEVER diet, but all that heavy cream is just, well, too HEAVY sometimes. I want the ease and crust of crème brûlée, but the lightness of flan. Is that too much to ask?

Last year, I probably printed out five or six flan and crème brûlée recipes and made several of them. All tasted good, but were enough trouble that I didn't try to make them again until recently. Then, I found a recipe that included less cream, and added in one of my favorite ingredients: sweetened condensed milk. I have my mother's habit of calling this simply "Eagle Brand" after the popular brand, which may stem from the fact that my Mom ate it by the spoonfuls when she was pregnant with me. I sometimes do that too, when no one is looking.

So I've experimented with this sweetened condensed milk version of flan, using lowfat milk, half and half, and sometimes smallish amounts of heavy cream depending upon what I have in the house. Sometimes it's lighter, sometimes creamier. One egg per cup of dairy seems to be about right; that's about 1 cup of eggs for 4 cups of milk, etc. I changed the combination without measuring, and it hasn't seemed to impact the results. No cooking is involved in making the flan mixture, just mix well and pour into custard cups. The biggest pain in the whole process is the water bath, but if you can't boil water, you shouldn't be in the kitchen anyway.

The last challenge was to create that nice sugar crust without resorting to WMDs like my flame thrower, I mean flame weeder (which I just learned today has been recalled for safety reasons). I'm a little slow sometimes, but it hit me one day when I opened up the oven door to broil something. That lovely line of flames at the top of my gas stove. I lined up my finished flan on a pan, put it on the very top rack about 2 inches from the flame and about three minutes later, perfectly melted and slightly browned sugar. (I also learned today that you must use a sturdy restaurant-quality sheet pan or else it may warp and all the sugar turn black and catch fire. If that happens, just place an ordinary plate over the custard dish to smother the flames and turn on the overhead vent before the smoke alarm goes off.)

So here is my recipe for flan brûlée. I Googled it and no one seems to have come up with anything quite like it. Sorry it is a day late for Valentine's Day, but I was eating some for Valentine's Day and didn't have time to blog about it!

Jen’s Flan Brûlée

1/4 cup white sugar
3-4 eggs (to equal 1 cup)
14 oz. can sweetened condensed milk
18 oz. milk/cream (combination of 12 oz. can evaporated milk, lowfat milk, cream or half and half depending on desired richness)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
6 tablespoons raw or demerara sugar

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F
In a large bowl, beat eggs. Beat in condensed milk, other milk and vanilla until smooth.
Pour egg mixture into 6 individual custard cups. Place cups in a large baking dish and fill dish with hot water about halfway up sides of custard cups (you might want to place the pan in the oven first and then immediately fill with hot water from a kettle.
Bake in preheated oven 60 minutes or until set in center (test with toothpick). Let cool and refrigerate at least 1 hour.

Heat broiler to high. Place custard cups on a metal sheet pan and sprinkle each evenly with 1 tablespoon of raw sugar. Put pan on broiler rack at highest or second highest level and broil until sugar melts and just starts to brown, about 5 minutes. Watch carefully! Cool slightly and serve.

COFFEE FLAN: Dissolve 4 ½ teaspoons instant coffee or espresso in 4 teaspoons hot water. Cool and add to egg mixture. Add cinnamon, if desired.

R.I.P. Randy the Rooster

Now that the required period of mourning is over, it is time to tell the tale of the sad end to the life of Randy the Rooster. It all started with my decision to enact some "tough love" and force my chickens to forage for some of their own food. Their period of molting had gone on for nearly three months, foiling my master plan that they earn their own keep, meaning bags of Purina Layena from Tractor Supply. Never mind that I had probably $1000 invested in the henhouse, feeders, waterers, essential chicken-keeping gadgets and assorted fencing. I needed to sell enough eggs to make that $13 every three weeks or so, plus all the eggs we wanted to eat ourselves.

The last straw was when I had to BUY eggs to make my daughter’s birthday cake in early November. Despite my fears about roving hawks and eagles, I opened the door to the chicken yard a sunny Saturday and one by one, the hens cautiously bobbed their way outside. Randy and I regarded each other cautiously. I stood my ground, quaking a bit inside, memories of my brother’s demon silky bantam still quite vivid. Strutting over to the open door from the far side of the yard, Randy suddenly sidestepped and quickly made his way over to a tantalizing green patch about 10 feet away. My butterflies calmed; a victory over childhood fears.

So it went for several days. Although November, it was still warm enough to do a few outside garden chores. As I pulled up frost-killed tomato plants and stacked tomato cages, I enjoyed the friendly company of my clucking hens and concluded this was the relationship I was supposed to have with my flock. The kids’ interest in the chickens was renewed, and they enjoyed sprinkling scratch corn on the ground and watching the hens come running. Randy kept his distance, asserting his control by standing statue-like, observant, chest out.

About a week later, my daughter’s desire to pet one of the hens got the best of her. She crept quietly to the far side of the coop, where the hens scratched happily in the pine needles beneath the trees. She had only just touched a soft, feathered back with one hand when Randy flew at her. I can only imagine that the shrillness of her scream—which I heard from inside the closed house—terrified him as much as she was terrified. Unhurt, she ran to me and described the offenses of the accused in heart-wrenching terms. I was irritated at Randy’s misbehavior spoiling my plans to have true free-range chickens. But attacking a petite preteen was even worse. Don’t mess with my baby.

Still unsure what action to take, I released the chickens only while the kids were in school. Over the summer I had experimented with a rotating chicken yard extension using rebar and light plastic fencing. There was no way I could let them roam free with so many tasty leafy greens and vegetables waiting in the garden. Unfortunately, my “temporary” fence had to be moved every five days or so. The chickens’ habit of incessant scratching lay 100 square feet of lawn bare in no time. A mid-summer drought killed off most of the grass in the area adjacent the coop and by September the chickens were back to their confined yard, contenting themselves with ample tomato peels and other scraps from my end-of-season canning.

So, I continued to let the flock out on days when I could be home to observe and supervise. It was then that Randy’s truly nasty disposition became evident. Poultry experts in my Backyard Poultry magazine have described the protective nature of roosters, their calls to warn the hens of impending danger, their habit of allowing the others to partake of the choicest treats first. I saw no such behavior. Instead, Randy would peck at the hens in order to steal a soft tomato. Although I am well-aware that poultry mating rituals are anything but gentle, Randy would appear domineering even when he was not doing his business. The girls ran from him, cackling in fear.

A neighbor teased me for my skittishness around Randy. She would bring huge of buckets of vegetable scraps over to the chickens almost daily, and I marveled at how she simply opened the door to the yard and tossed them in. I had to dump my scraps from above through a flap in the netting that covered the top; otherwise Randy would rush the door to attack me. Once, I slammed my own hand in the wire door in an attempt to protect myself. I should have recognized that it was only a matter of time before Randy extended his dominion over the entire back yard and not just the portion to which he was formerly confined.

One fine afternoon in early December, I let the chickens out to forage for the last of the broccoli stalks and whatever patches of clover they could find. I brought a cup of scratch and tossed it well away from their coop so I could retrieve their feeder for refilling. Eager to keep my truce with Randy, I did not want to encroach on his space or pose any kind of threat to his hens. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw them all pecking away happily as I walked back with a full feeder in one hand and a bucket of shredded paper for bedding in the other. Suddenly, I felt a sharp pain in my knee and turned to see Randy, feathers ruffled, ready to fly at me again with spurs forward.

I dropped the feeder and placed the bucket between me and my attacker. My instincts told me that running was futile, for I had observed Randy’s overly large drumsticks as he ran to take a worm away from a hen. I backed as fast as I could toward the house—a distance of about 40 feet—meanwhile fending off at least five additional attacks. Slamming the back door quickly behind me, I limped into my office and pulled up my pant leg to assess the damage. Randy had put about a ½ inch deep puncture on the side of my right knee, through my thick, flannel-lined jeans. Thoughts of chicken poop and salmonella led me to the bathroom, where I poured hydrogen peroxide into the wound and marveled at how much it hurt.

My adrenaline had kicked in. The school bus was due in about 5 minutes and there was no way I was going to allow a bully rooster to go after my chicks. I donned thick leather gloves, grabbed a shovel just outside and headed out the front door to the driveway. Randy was nowhere in sight. The kids arrived home safely and listened wide-eyed to my story. I must have had a crazed look, because they kept their distance and quietly went into their rooms. I stood at my office window overlooking the garden and chicken coop and tried to decide whether to kill Randy then, or later.

In the end, I decided my aim was too bad to go back out and take Randy on in shovel-to-spur combat. I called my husband, Carl, told him my story, and reasoned that we would wait until they settled in on the roost for the night. At that point I wanted him to grab Randy for me. I would do the deed, I assured him, but only after he was captive. I planned to try the old neck-under-the-broomstick method I’d read about. Just pin their necks down with one foot on either side of the broom and pull up on the feet. Easy. No blood. Then, I would finally try butchering a chicken myself. If I messed it up, nicked a bowel or something, it was only an old rooster after all.

Carl arrived home early, a man on a mission. Before I could get my boots back on, he was after Randy with a stick, and had much better aim than I. But roosters are resilient and fast, and Randy took off across the yard toward the next-door neighbors, legs pumping furiously. Suffering from a post-Thanksgiving gout flare-up, Carl was even less mobile than me with my injured knee. What it sight it must have been to see the two of us, bearing shovel and net, limping across the front yard after Randy like the crazy guy in The Shining. For a moment, we almost trapped him near the door to the neighbor’s basement, but he somehow escaped the net and ran cackling into the woods behind our houses.

I was relieved. Some critter would get him during the night and I wouldn’t have to perpetrate an ugly revenge killing. It’s one thing to neatly butcher your animals for meat, another to hunt them down in anger. The next morning, I peered outside to see if Randy had somehow managed to find his way back to the coop, but there was no sign of him. Carl left for work, but called only a few minutes later: Randy had emerged from his wooded hiding place and was strutting along the roadside. The neighborhood children were all about to head out to wait for the bus.

Hastily throwing on a coat over my pajamas, I armed myself with the shovel and walked out the end of the driveway with the kids. Sure enough, there was Randy. A passing truck had scared him over to the opposite side of the road, where he jauntily strode across an open field toward the daycare two houses over. It suddenly dawned on me that I had to warn people. All I needed was for my aggressive ‘roo to attack some small child. That was what led to the death of my brother’s silky. On the very day new neighbors from the “city” moved in next to my parents, the bantam attacked their four-year old. I think it only horrified them further when we killed and ate him.

I called the neighbor with the daycare, who fortunately has quite a menagerie of animals herself, and had once owned chickens. She said she would let the parents know that they shouldn’t allow their toddlers to try and pet the little chickie. Next, I phoned my nearest neighbor, who promptly laughed and asked if we wanted to borrow his 22 or if he should ‘plug’ Randy for us. Not necessary, I said. I went back outside to find the lady who lived across the field in her bathrobe shooing Randy away from her house.

“You better leave him alone,” I yelled from across the road. “He might attack you!”

“I’m worried the dogs might get him,” she called. They have a half dozen or more retrievers and coon dogs.

“Let them!” I hollered. Randy continued across the field and disappeared.

All day long, I peered outside my window at the coop, thinking perhaps he would try to return to his hens. About mid-day, I saw the lady from across the road walking down the driveway, white bucket in hand. “Sorry. Our hunting dog got him.”

I was jubilant. “Oh, it’s o.k. He had to go.” I peered into the bucket, and was disappointed. “You cleaned him? You know how to do that?!”

“Well, I’ve cleaned plenty of wild game. But I had a hard time getting the feathers off his wings, so I just cut the tips off. And his neck is still attached.”

I pondered whether to ask her for evisceration lessons. “That’s o.k. I’ll clean him up.” We said our goodbyes. It was the first time we had met face to face, other than to wave from the car. I brought Randy inside and got out a boning knife and a cutting board. All in all, he didn’t look too bad. Not a tooth mark on him. No pinfeathers remained. The worst thing was that his neck stretched out before him, making him appear as aggressive in death as he did in life. I had a devil of a time cutting the neck off neatly. I think rigor mortis had started to set in. Although I was a little sorry I hadn’t gotten the chance to pluck and gut him, mostly I was glad it was all over. And, after all, it’s not every day when your neighbor returns your rooster to you in a bucket, fully dressed for cooking.

Online instructions from backyardpoultry.com informed me that I needed to wait two days for the butchered chicken to “relax” before cooking. In the meantime, I planned my meal. Thinking, like any good foodie, “What would Julia [Child] do?” I decided that coq au vin would be my dish of choice, stewed in wine and broth, the perfect use for an older chicken. Randy was large and meaty, unlike the Delaware hens I’d had butchered the year before. The aroma from the simmering pot of meat was very appetizing, although the meat seemed a bit dark, perhaps from the wine. As we all cut into our portion, one thing became apparent: Randy was as tough in death as he was in life. This was perhaps the biggest disappointment of all. Each of us bravely, almost ritualistically, ate a few bites, then the rest of Randy went into the trash. Truly, a sad ending.

I am trying my best to be politically correct and not make any snap judgments about roosters, even though I have never known a ‘nice’ rooster. Randy was just a bad seed (egg?), not a reflection of all roosters, but a bird who made poor choices in his life, choices that brought him to a bad end. Make of this what you will, but prior to Randy’s departure my hens had slowed to laying 1 or 2 eggs a week. For three days after his death, I collected an egg a day, then three and then four. I have consistently gathered five to seven eggs daily ever since. Coincidence or feminist poultry statement? I, for one, feel a greater sense of liberty, like a dark cloud has lifted.

In the power vacuum formed since Randy's sudden disappearance, my dominance over the hens has been confirmed. Each time I go in to the backyard and croon a low "chick-a-chick," my girls come running. The pied piper of hens, I stroll about the backyard, flock following me frantically. To be honest, the first time they started running after me (or perhaps the cup of corn I held), I was a bit scared--Randy flashbacks, you know. Now, I strut about confidently. When it is time for them to go inside at the end of the day, I stand by their yard door and call out to them gently but insistently. Obediently, they all file into the coop.

I am the egg (wo)man. They are my hens. I am the rooster. Cock-a-doodle doo!

Time and Strawberries Wait for No One

   Nature, the weather and plants have their own schedule--and they never check with humans when making it. A quick check of last year's garden journal last month revealed that this year's strawberry crop was coming a full three weeks early thanks to a spell of unseasonably warm weather and ample spring rain. The harvest was record-breaking: 83 quarts by the time I gave up and sacrifice the rest to the birds last week.
Unfortunately, the last of the peak picking days (14 quarts one day, 20 two days later) came just after I left for a week-long trip to Tennessee with my daughter. I processed 12 pints and 8 half pints of jam, along with 25 bags of frozen berries in the days before leaving. I arrived in Tennessee with a back sore from stooping and hands stained reddish-brown from hours of washing and hulling berries. When I returned, I added some fruit leather to my pantry, on the suggestion of a fellow gardener who makes real "rollups" for his kids. All in all, I 'm pleased with what I've stored up for the winter, and I had ample quarts to share with neighbors, friends and family.
   I left my husband and son at home with the strawberries, but with school and work, they didn't have the couple of hours daily that it takes to pick the beds thoroughly. I invited a friend to come over to pick and take home all she could. I'm not sure my husband understood the innate urgency I feel when it comes to not wasting a single berry and to saving as much of the fruits of my labor as I can. The thought of my berries lying "mouldering" on the ground made me feel a bit sick.

   The intensity of the strawberry season--and in turn, blueberries, blackberries, peaches and so on--reminds me yet again of the unforgiving cycle of farming. "Farmers must never go on vacation, except in winter," I moaned on my Facebook page as I packed for my trip. Then again, by winter they might be too tired to vacation. I recall the words of Anna Willson of Trumpington in Kent County, Maryland in the late 1800s. She struggled to entertain summer guests at the time of the peach harvest, after which her husband declared, "never again will we have staying guests during peach season." By the winter, with the preparations for the Christmas season following hog butchering, Anna was exhausted and decided against taking an excursion to Baltimore or even to attend holiday parties.

   I also reflect on the situation of the local and migrant pickers, especially as my back aches and my knees groan after spending only a half hour or so stooped in picking. Although it may have been a relief to have a period of guaranteed work, the prospect of 12-plus-hour days spent bent over with forearms immersed in itchy strawberry vines must have tempered any enthusiasm. Historically, the abysmally low pay and substandard housing provided made life tremendously difficult for this under class of workers. But they, like me, were carried along on the tide of the season, working as hard and as long as necessary to get the job done. Then a break--often brief--until the next harvest wave arrived.